Tivo HD Upgrade Instructions - using JMFS

Sorry for newbie question but what is wdidle3? I used MFSTools on the drive in upsized to on my TiVo HD.

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It's the Western Digital utility used to adjust or disable the "Intellipark" setting on some WD drives. Some WD drives are set by default to park the heads after a short period of inactivity. This causes soft boots of TiVos to fail, requiring a power cycle to get it back up.

It's the Western Digital utility used to adjust or disable the "Intellipark" setting on some WD drives. Some WD drives are set by default to park the heads after a short period of inactivity. This causes soft boots of TiVos to fail, requiring a power cycle to get it back up.

Sorry for newbie question but what is wdidle3? I used MFSTools on the drive in upsized to on my TiVo HD.

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It is a utility written by WD which adjust the timing period used by the Intellipark feature found on some of it's Caviar Green line of hard drives.

After a certain period of inactivity Intellipark spins down the drive and parks the heads. This is supposed to reduce electricity consumption and heat generation.

But the TiVo drive is never inactive when the TiVo is plugged in.

Except when it's re-booting itself, a so-called "soft boot".

It goes into a soft boot, quits calling on the drive for anything for a few seconds, drive spins down.

TiVo then gets far enough into boot to call on drive, drive not ready, which causes TiVo to re-reboot to try again.

In the meantime, the drive, having gotten the nudge from the TiVo, wakes up and answers, but by that time the TiVo has started re-booting again and isn't answering the answer, so the drive goes to sleep again, which is how the TiVo finds it when it gets far enough into the boot process to call on the drive.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

wdidle3 let's you make timing period of inactivity before the drive goes to sleep longer, so that it's still awake when the TiVo gets far enough into the re-boot to call on it again, or on some models it'll let you disable Intellipark altogether.

Although setting the period for 300 seconds (5 minutes) is pretty much the same thing as disabling it where use in a TiVo is concerned, so either will work.

Not to be pedantic, but I don't believe that the Intellipark feature spins down the drive, just parks the heads and turns off the read/write electronics. In fact, the main purpose of this feature is to reduce aerodynamic drag so it requires less power to keep the drive spinning.

Since spinning up is one of the more stressful activities for a drive, nobody would think doing it that often was a good idea.

Not to be pedantic, but I don't believe that the Intellipark feature spins down the drive, just parks the heads and turns off the read/write electronics. In fact, the main purpose of this feature is to reduce aerodynamic drag so it requires less power to keep the drive spinning.

Since spinning up is one of the more stressful activities for a drive, nobody would think doing it that often was a good idea.

Initially I tried to use USB but when I booted into the JMFS I was unable to see the drives. Instead I connected a USB hub to my eSata port. After that I was able to see both drives without any issues.

The total time for the upgrade was about 5.5 hours with no errors.

The only issue I had was using WDIDLE I was not able to see the updated tivo drive. But my drive was not Jan 2013 .. from my understanding this was just an issue for drives prior to Jan 2013.

After the upgrade the tivo works fine without any issues. First time bootup seemed to hang sightly but continued to the tivo menu. Also the first time I went to the menu it was a little slow .. it seems that was just the first time.

After a few minutes of usage response time seems ok and the menu does not hang.

I just used JMFS Live (v1.04), per the first post in this thread, to replace a 1TB previously upgraded WinMFS drive in my Tivo HD. The old drive even stopped booting eventually (periodic reboots during shows before that).

The JMFS Live software copied settings and recordings to a new WD20EURS 2TB drive. It booted right up in the Tivo.

I did the disk copy. About 12 hours to copy 1TB of data and try to repair my bad sectors. The bad drive really slowed things down.

I did the expansion (not supersize). JMFS reported something like 288 hours. But in my Tivo, I am getting, 314 or 318 (cannot remember).

That was it. I didn't check acoustics. I didn't check the idle timeout (soft reboots work no problem). My drive was manufactured in January 2013.

Thanks for the help, everyone, particularly to Tivoitis (first post) and comer (software) - at least it seems.

I just used JMFS Live (v1.04), per the first post in this thread, to replace a 1TB previously upgraded WinMFS drive in my Tivo HD. The old drive even stopped booting eventually (periodic reboots during shows before that).

The JMFS Live software copied settings and recordings to a new WD20EURS 2TB drive. It booted right up in the Tivo.

I did the disk copy. About 12 hours to copy 1TB of data and try to repair my bad sectors. The bad drive really slowed things down.

I did the expansion (not supersize). JMFS reported something like 288 hours. But in my Tivo, I am getting, 314 or 318 (cannot remember).

That was it. I didn't check acoustics. I didn't check the idle timeout (soft reboots work no problem). My drive was manufactured in January 2013.

Thanks for the help, everyone, particularly to Tivoitis (first post) and comer (software) - at least it seems.

- Paul

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I'm happy for you that it worked out, however future readers might like to know that in your situation, provided the TiVo had already been upgraded to version 11.0k of the software (almost a certainty if you've had it operating lately), one could do the copying and then use WinMFS to just enlarge the previously added 3rd MFS Media partition, even if the stock drive had been upgraded to the 1TB with the MFS Live cd and there was a small Apple Free partition left at the end (which would defeat jmfs).

And that's true for all of the S3's, even the original OLED panel with the clock one.

The tricky thing is what to use to do the copy if the source drive has any problems.

But once you've got a good, working copy on the new target drive, WinMFS can expand into the rest of the space and 11.0k will let the TiVo use all of it, even though that last partition is going to be something like 1.6TB in size if you went with a 2TB target drive.